Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

talking. As if he couldn’t think of any more to say. The rooks were loud overhead. His hands hung very still at his sides.

Something in your hair. A twig. There, it’s gone.

Her hair was heavy and black, falling away, the knot already unravelled.

His hand was more delicate than she would have thought such a hand could be, a hand that dealt with big rough things, with machines, but so light just then that she wasn’t even sure it touched her. She put up her own hand to his. She might have just moved it away, gently, tactfully, just put it away, so that he had taken whatever it was that was caught in her hair and it would have been gone, and all of that moment might have been delicately put away.

Her hand small in his. Her touch soft, and dry. Holding, stalling, his. Movement stalled.

She might have slipped away, out from the trees and into the fields. And when they were outside of that wood, where almost no one ever went anyway, where they would never have needed to go again, then the moment might have been left behind there in the tangle. They would have been out in the clear fields and the daylight where things like that were not allowed to happen. Only she did not slip away. He did what he should not have done. And she did what she should not have done. Because Richard had been somehow at the heart of all that summer, since she saw him that first morning out there in the wheat when it was still green. They were standing under the tree. He reached to her hair and she put up her hand to move his away, and he caught her hand in his. She had her back to the trunk of the great tree. He held one of her hands in his, and put his other hand to the tree beside her. He was the summer. He, they, the two of them, were destroying the summer. She spoke too late.

This is crazy. We cannot do this. I should not be here. Why did I come here?

She spoke softly, her hand twisting in his, but holding it all the same. She could have gone. She could so easily have gone, twisted away, but she did not move. She only spoke, in that soft voice of hers. We can’t. Can’t what? Whispered words. A racket of rooks overhead. But she had begun it. She had come out to find him, hadn’t she?

Can’t. Can’t. The rooks had all the words, over their heads. Nature is hard, he had said. The bark of the tree hard on her back. Rooks black in the morning sky. His eyes open and blue. No shadow in them. Like sky. Why no shadow? Can’t. And not there. Not with what had happened there in the past.

Something bad had happened there in the past, but something bad was happening in the present. She saw that she was the one who was doing it. She was suddenly aware, and angry. His eyes looking into hers. So blue. No shadow in them. Did she want to see shadow in them, before she could move? Or was it only that she could not pull herself away?

No, she whispered. The rooks were loud above them. No, Richard, we can’t do this.

How could you do this? she said. And here, why here? How could you bring me here, of all places?

She could feel the confusion beginning in him, his body stiffening, eyes looking about as if there was something that he should have seen.

You know, don’t you? Here. It was just here. Right here on the ground where we’re standing. Jonathan knows. Jonathan saw. Jonathan told me.

She was talking out loud now. When she had started to speak it had been only a whisper. She did not move. She did not pull herself away. She went on, aloud, becoming cruel. Driving the point home. Wanting him at the same time. It was a kind of violence.

But you must have known, Jonathan always knew, everyone knew, only they didn’t say, because you people don’t talk about that sort of thing.

What, what thing? he was asking.

Again he asked. He was beginning to understand. He was letting go of her, drawing back, turning away to look about him at the place where it had happened. But he had to have her make it plain. So it was all clear. So that he knew what Jonathan knew. No more secrets. So that was what she did.

And then you buried that dog here. What made you do that? Don’t you see what that meant?

Putting up the rooks

Suddenly she was sorry. She put those neat little hands up before her mouth. Like a doll surprised.

There was no way she could take it back. She had said what she had said, and everything fell into a new place.

It all made sense.

He dropped his arm from the tree. Nothing could happen here any more. Something had happened here once in the past and now there was no present to be had here. Only the past. He let her go, without a word, hands held to her face but in shame now, careless of the nettles that brushed against her jeans and her bare elbows as she went. Even she had known.

He used to come with his father and shoot, just here. Not when it was green like now, with the leaves and the nettles, but in winter when it was all brown, the ground and the trees. Shhh, Richard, his father would say, and he would stand beside him, still as the dog knew to be still, not right under the oak where Kumiko had pointed but at the edge of its cover where there was a view out onto open fields and sky and the pigeons coming in to roost. He had